CARBON is the basis of more molecules than all the other elements put together. It is, though, surprisingly inert. A lump of graphite or a diamond will sit happily on a laboratory bench without bursting into flames, or even rusting, and is impervious to the action of water. Better ways of manipulating the element are therefore always welcome, particularly as organic chemicals, as carbon compounds are known whether or not they have ever been part of a living creature, form the basis of much human industry.
That this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry has gone to a better way of synthesising organic compounds is thus a welcome decision—and an appropriate complement to the physics prize, which was also awarded for a piece of carbon chemistry, the discovery of graphene. The winners, Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, used palladium as a catalyst.
The ball was set rolling in the 1960s, by Dr Heck, of the University of Delaware. He used palladium to promote reactions involving alkenes—molecules in which two carbon atoms are joined by what is known as a double bond (each carbon atom can form up to four bonds with other atoms, which is why there are so many types of organic compound). Dr Negishi, of Purdue University, then went on to improve the process, by involving zinc-based compounds, as well as palladium. Dr Suzuki, of the University of Sapporo, applied the finishing touches by adding boron compounds to the mix. The result is a set of chemical processes that are used to make a host of drugs, such as Taxol, and also complex chemicals such as fungicides. They might even be used to turn out new forms of computer screen.
PS This year's medicine prize was awarded to Robert Edwards for his work on in vitro fertilisation.
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The 2010 Nobel prizes: Physics
Oct 5th 2010, 11:35 by G.C.
REGULAR readers of The Economist’s science and technology coverage will know that we often question the purpose of the Nobel prize for chemistry. In 1895, when Alfred Nobel drew up his will, chemistry was one of the most exciting sciences around. With completion of the periodic table, though, and with modern understanding of chemical bonds as quantum phenomena caused by the pairing of electrons of opposite spins, chemistry as an intellectual discipline looks, to the outsider at least, to have been largely solved. Our complaint is not that chemistry-prize winners in recent years are unworthy of their laurels. Rather, it is that the intellectual side of their discoveries often seems more to do with the fields of physics or physiology. The advancement of chemistry as a subject in its own right often seems secondary.
It is ironic, then, that Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science has used this year’s physics prize to reward what looks like a shoo-in for the chemistry prize: graphene. Precedent, in the form of the 1996 prize for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene (a football-shaped arrangement of 60 carbon atoms), suggests that new forms of carbon crystal fall within the purview of chemistry. Graphene is such. It is a crystal a single atomic layer thick. Yet it is the physics prize that its discoverers, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (right and left, respectively, in the picture above), who work at the University of Manchester, in England, have been awarded. Academically, both are, indeed, physicists. And the blurring of the two disciplines can be seen in the fact that Dr Geim is head of an institute called the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience & Nanotechnology. Rebranding chemistry departments with the magic word “nanotechnology” has been all the rage for a decade (though, to be fair to Manchester, it still has a thriving school of traditional chemistry as well).
As to the discovery itself, it was made in a beautifully simple way, by peeling layers of atoms off a crystal of graphite (the cheap, black form of carbon, as opposed to the expensive transparent form known as diamond) using sticky tape. As buckminsterfullerene was in its day, graphene is now hailed, metaphorically, as the most exciting thing since sliced bread. It is electrically conductive, strong and transparent. It is thus being touted for applications that range from lightweight materials for aircraft to touch-screens for computers. And it does, in truth, look a more plausible candidate for commercialisation than buckminsterfullerene.
A worthy winner, then. But it will be interesting to see what discovery in chemistry trumps it. That will be announced on Wednesday.
PS Here is what Babbage thinks of this year's medicine prize, for in vitro fertilisation.
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The 2010 Nobel prizes: Medicine
Oct 4th 2010, 12:27 by G.C.
SOME are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some have greatness thrust upon them. Substitute “fame” for “greatness” and you have an updated version of Shakespeare’s quip that applies nicely to this year’s Nobel prize for medicine, which was awarded for the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The born-famous was Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby. The achiever of fame, celebrated at the time in newspapers and on television, was Patrick Steptoe, the gynecologist who created Ms Brown in his laboratory in 1978. And the man who has had fame thrust upon him, a mere 32 years after the event, is Robert Edwards, who spent more than two decades developing the science that IVF relies on. Dr Edwards was honoured for this work by the Karolinska Institute, on October 4th (though the prize will not actually be handed over until December). Steptoe died in 1988, and prizes are not awarded posthumously, so Dr Edwards scoops the whole pool of SKr10m ($1.5m).
Dr Edwards began his work on mice, before moving to people. He gradually worked out how human eggs mature to the point where they can be fertilised, but had little success getting such fertilised eggs to develop into embryos that could be implanted into women, in order that they could grow into children.
The breakthrough came when he teamed up with Steptoe, who was working on the then-novel technique of laparoscopy (keyhole surgery). Dr Edwards realised that laparoscopy could be used to extract eggs from women’s ovaries in reasonably large numbers (until then, he had been relying on more intrusive surgical methods to obtain them). This, combined with hormone injections to bring those eggs to the correct state of maturity before they were removed, meant that women who were infertile because their Fallopian tubes were blocked might have eggs extracted, fertilised outside their bodies by sperm from the man of their choice, and the embryos that resulted implanted into their wombs—thus bypassing the Fallopian blockage.
Ms Brown was the result—and the first of what are now reckoned to be 4m people born as a consequence of IVF. At the time, though, the technique was controversial. Steptoe and Dr Edwards were accused of playing God, being like Victor Frankenstein and so on. A lesson, perhaps, for those who have similar knee-jerk reactions to things like human cloning.
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